Weather.com, chunk the intrusive ads, please

The BBQ Pit
1

I don’t have a problem with ads on the Net. Honestly, I don’t.

But when a fairly respectable site, such as weather.com, makes it well-nigh impossible to find the single piece of information people want from their site (namely, the weather forecast), I have to call foul.

There’s an ad on the front page of the weather.com site for a Volkswagen van. As a part of this ad’s program, the van drives on the Web page, obscuring text and blocking access to the weather.com site until the van drives off the page. It’s about ten seconds, which is not a huge deal in the grand scheme of things. But it’s time that I have to wait to access the information for which I went to that site.

Once the freakin’ van is gone, I type in the name of the city for which I want the weather forecast. Before taking me to that page, a pop-up ad for Casino on the Net fills my screen. We have a pretty liberal Web policy at work, and my boss doesn’t care if I’m checking the weather. He might have something to say, though, were he to walk in and see a big casino ad on my screen. Does Casino on the Net really think their target demographic is weather.com users?

I expect intrusive ads and pop-up ads on stuff like porn sites and other low-rent Web sites. But weather.com? Give me a break.

2

It would also be nice if they could forecast. “Scattered thunderstorms” or “partly cloudy” for 10 days in a row isn’t a forecast.

3

I like Weather Underground: http://www.wunderground.com.

For a mere $5 a year, you get your weather info with no ads. I subscribed because they no longer serve their animated maps for free, but I’ve found it soooo refreshing to read a website that isn’t constantly exhorting me to punch the monkey.

4

Sauron, are you on IE? I tried http://www.weather.com with Netscape and saw neither VW nor pop-up. Triton, give AccuWeather a try instead; they display the National Weather Service forecast in addition to their own. Accuweather has a pop-up with IE but not Netscape.

5

Yup, IE 5. I think the Volkswagen ad is one of several that rotates in that spot on the right side of the page.

I suppose I ought to rant at VW, as well, for designing an ad that makes it impossible to use the Web page you’re visiting for a short space of time.